I'm a geochemist. In the past ten years I've fixed mass spectrometers, blasted sapphires with a laser beam, explored for uranium in a nature reserve, and measured growth patterns in fish ears, and helped design the next generation of the world's most advanced ion probe. My main interest is in-situ mass spectrometry, but I have a soft spot in my heart for thermodynamics, drillers, and cosmochemistry.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

A week and a half ago, I pointed out the gender imbalance
apparent in the September issue of Geology.
My particular gripe was that it would be hard to achieve gender balance
in my ongoing geopoetry series if issues (like the September one) had three or
fewer papers by women authors. With
encouragements from commenters and the geotwitter rock stars, I had a slightly
deeper look into what is going on with gender in geology, by recording the given
name-assumed gender and author order for a year’s worth of Geology articles.

In total, this included 239 papers with a total of 1164
authors. The number of authors per paper
ranged from 1 to 19. Of these authors, 64% were male, 19% were female, and 16%
were initials. Initial authors excluded from the analysis; Most (57%) of them
were on papers with six or more authors, so I assume that initialization was
generally a space-saving exercise.

Looking only at uninitiated papers, the M/F ratio is 76.9%
to 23.1%. This is not too different to the
professional gender balance quoted here (76% M) and is slightly better than the
decade-old numbers on assistant professor hires (23% F), but is substantially
worse than the (similar era) graduating PhD student ratio (38% F). So the
implication is that the Geology gender ratio mostly reflects post-grad school anti-female
filtering.

As for author order, the observed vs expected ratios (given
the gender ratio) are shown in the figure below. Due to the small size of the data set and the
large number of individual categories, none of these deviations are
statistically significant; the probability of sole author papers being seven M
to zero F is about 14%- not high, but not enough to convict either. The M/F of first authors, second authors, etc. was generally within a few percentage points of the mean ratio, and always within counting stats.

And a quick Monte
Carlo* suggests that the probability of getting three
or fewer female first authors in any particular issue is about 28% (see below),
based on 10,000 random author list generations for 20-paper issues.

This is only a simulation, of course. It will take the
Geological Society of America just shy of 800 years to put out their 10,000th
issue. Let’s hope that gender equity in
academia has been achieved by then.

* Yes, I know there is an analytical solution, but
simulations are more fun and quicker.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Since the Keranen et al. paper a few months ago, there has
been much discussion on the relationship between earthquakes and wastewater
disposal wells from unconventional hydrocarbon extraction (a.k.a. fracking).

Most of this discussion related to earthquake swarms on Oklahoma, where seismicity has dramatically
increased in recent years. However, it
is worth pointing out that Oklahoma
is by no means the biggest fracking state.
That is Texas, with almost ten times
the oil production of Oklahoma. The USGS produces earthquake maps of every
state, ad Texas (and Oklahoma) can be seen here:

What is immediately apparent is that despite the much larger
size and production, Texas
has slightly fewer quakes. The next biggest
fracking state, after Texas, is North Dakota, which has recently surpassed Alaska and California to
be the USA’s
second biggest oil producer (three times more than Oklahoma). Its
earthquake map looks like this:

Even the Keranen et al. paper stresses that many injection
wells are aseismic, and that a mere four wells account for the majority of
earthquakes. This sort of attention to detail is important to consider when
evaluating this technology. Understanding facts and details is the first
step in uncovering processes which we can then use to improve our use and
stewardship of natural resources.

And finally, just for comparison, here is the seismic map
for Alaska,
which I’m putting up here because of the beautiful Benioff zone which has
nothing to do with petroleum at all.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Climate change is in the news again, with the liberals
renewing their call for collectivist action, and the anti-science branch of conservative
practicing various forms of do-nothingness.
As a goal-oriented, pro science conservative, I am not really
comfortable with either of these approaches. And the lack of a broad tent
conservative response irks me, so I suggest we go with the following, simple
yet powerful principle as a sensible, potentially unifying response to climate
change:

No climate bailouts.

This is a good conservative approach for the following
reasons:

1. It is uniting.
Under this approach, it doesn't matter if you believe in climate change
or not. Those who do not can oppose
climate bailouts with the same principles which impel them to oppose bailouts
for unicorn farmers. So we can all stop
arguing about climate science and respect each other’s differences.

2. It differentiates us from the liberals. Al Gore and his ideological descendants basically
push the following line: “Global Warming means we have to all turn into
collectivists” Needless to say, this
upsets a lot of people. By denying
bailouts, we are placing the costs and risk assessment firmly in the hands of
the polluters. The market is the best
way to determine the probability of climate change, and the associated
cost. Let the polluters deal with
insurance and risk assessment and lawsuits associated with potential damages.
While any costs will of course be passed on to consumers, if those costs are
too high, then we can buy our energy from a non-polluting source. That’s how free markets work. The important thing is that it does not
commit us to open ended government spending to bail out polluters.

3. It is flexible.
Drawing a line in the sand on bailouts does not prevent public or
private action. There are many creative ways in which governments, companies, and people can tackle
climate change and save money instead of spending it. Whether it is streamlining approval processes
or increasing government energy efficiency or requiring utilities to compete
for the lowest energy price available, the list of potential actions goes
on. Similarly, this approach allows
principled, can-do compromise on climate action, provided that the core
principle remains intact.

There are severalotherproposals for how conservatives
should react to the climate change issue. While they are sensible, none are this simple.
Polluters have known about the possibility of climate change ever since
Al Gore was thin and dark haired.
They’ve had plenty of time to study the issue and prepare based on the
most likely outcomes. If they are not
competent to do that, then they don’t deserve to be propped up with our
hard-earned money.

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Tokyo
is a busy city. Thirty-six million
people go call the region home, and go about their industrious, detailed lives
with an energy and rigor unique on this planet. It is hard to know exactly what
they are thinking; Japanese culture creates an aura or privacy and personal
space that the geography tries to deny.
And for an outsider accustomed to wide open spaces, the locals here can
sometimes seem hard to connect with. But
tonight was different. While 8 o’clock
is still the tail end of rush-hour in the hard working town, and Wednesday is
hump day here as surely as it is everywhere else, this did not change the
alignment of the sun and planets. 400,000 kilometers away, the full moon
crossed the ecliptic, and the Earth, for an hour, blotted out the light of the
sun on its airless surface.

And in that hour, the residents of Tokyo,
and Melbourne, and Fiji,
and Denver and Mt.
Isa and countless other countries ‘round the Pacific stopped what they were
doing, looked up at the sky, and watched the white light of the moon grow red
and dim. The electricity and data kept flowing, the trains kept leaving, the
advertisements kept flashing, the mechanical metabolism of the metropolis
rumbled on unchecked, but for a brief moment, a short while, or a lazy hour,
the inhabitants put aside the clockwork of their lives, looked up, and saw a distant world pass through our
collective shadow.

Monday, October 06, 2014

Like many physical science journals, Geology has a severe
male/female author imbalance. In part,
this may reflect the imbalance in researches publishing in the field. When I started the Geopoetry series, one of
my goals was to reduce the underrepresentation of women in science in my
selection of papers to poetify. Initially, this was easy; I was picking the
very most interesting papers from about 3 years worth of Geology issues to feed
my muse, and filtering for interestingness substantially lessened the gender
bias. However, as I transition into
pulling poems from the most recent issue or two, addressing this imbalance
becomes harder. For example, to find an
equal number of male and female authored papers when pulling four from a volume
which has three female and 20 male first authors requires the women to be many
times more interesting than the men. So
I have two requests:

For you, the readers, I ask this. If I start reverting to the mean Geolgoy M/F
ratio, please call me on it.

And for the editors of Geology, I ask this: Why is the
gender bias in our society flagship journal so bad (~13% in Sept 2014)? Does it
reflect the bias in submissions? Or is it an unintended consequence of the
review process? The anecdote that filtering for (subjective) interestingness
evens out the gender ratio suggests that female authors might be required to
clear a higher bar. Is this an editorial
problem or a reviewer problem? If it
lies in the reviewers, can high frequency reviewers have their reviews
statistically analysed so that a misogynistic correction factor can be built
into their reports?

I hope this is a tractable problem which can be fixed, and
I’ll try to continue to address it here at a rate of fourteen lines per week.
But hopefully more can be done.

Disclaimer:

All opinions, measurements, figures, and facts on this page are the personal opinions of Charles W. Magee, Jr, and do not represent the views of any of his employers: past, present, present-but-about-to-be-past, or future. None of the content herein has been subject to peer review, and should be treated with caution or derision. Any passing mention of OSHA code violations, criminal activities, unethical or unscientific behavior, or the clandestine Australian nuclear weapons program are fictions created to make rhetorical points, and do not represent the reality of my, or anyone else's, workplace. Do not attempt any scientific protocols described herein at home, with the exception of the chocolate chip cookie recipe. Do not apply the products of that protocol to individuals with heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or cholesterol, egg, wheat, dairy, or chocolate allergies. Do not view this blog continuously for more than 45 minutes without stretching and taking other precautions to prevent computer-related chronic injury.
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